Our lives are brief enough that the direction we are walking matters. Here Anni walks an old Roman road along the Camino de Santiago.
Two Dreams
I had two dreams this week.
In one of them, I was at a Christian conference listening to a Bible scholar I deeply respect. His teaching was rich and illuminating—the kind that makes Scripture suddenly feel larger. Afterward, a woman approached him. She told him how much she appreciated his teaching and wanted to learn more. Later, wandering down an unfamiliar hallway in the hotel hosting the conference, I passed an open door. There they were. Nothing overtly wrong was happening. They were fully dressed. The door was open. They were talking about the Bible.
But they were sitting close enough that their feet or legs were touching.
Something in me said, This is too close to a line.
I kept walking. Then I wondered whether I should go back and say something.
I didn’t want to.
I respected him deeply. The last thing I wanted was an awkward conversation with him.
That was the most revealing part of the dream.
Guarding Our Ways
I’ve been living in Psalm 39 this week.
David begins:
“I will keep watch over my ways So that I do not sin with my tongue.”
He is watching himself.
I find that strangely freeing. David doesn’t begin by diagnosing everybody around him. He starts with the one life he can actually tend: his own.
My other dream was simpler.
Something was offered to me that wasn’t right. I hadn’t been looking for it. I didn’t even want it. But there it was if I chose to take it.
Then I woke up.
Reflecting on what God might be showing me, I thought about fishing lures. A fisherman doesn’t expect every fish to strike every lure. He keeps casting different ones.
Life can feel a little like that.
Anger. Envy. Money. Sex. Recognition. Resentment. Power. Self-pity. Social media is intentionally designed to hook us with ads that might attract us. Not every lure catches every fish.
The question is not:
How could that person fall for that?
A better question might be:
What could catch me?
I have a few guardrails in place because I don’t want to find out how close to certain lines I can get. I don’t counsel or meet privately with a woman behind a closed door; at our place, two chairs outside in plain view work just fine. Anger is a yellow light—I try to ask later what was happening underneath it. Uneasiness is another one.
None of these guardrails means the situation itself must be sinful.
They simply help me avoid testing the edge.
A Breath
Then David asks God an unusual favour:
“LORD, let me know my end, And what is the extent of my days; Let me know how transient I am.”
A few lines later David calls every person “a mere breath”—hebel, vapor. Something here for a moment and then gone.
David watches people spend their brief lives accumulating things they cannot keep. We bustle around. We build, save, protect, and accumulate.
And then somebody else gets it.
Faced with that brevity, David’s prayer turns inward again:
“Save me from all my wrongdoings; Do not make me an object of reproach for the foolish.”
When I think about respected Christian leaders whose serious failures have come to light, one thing sobers me deeply.
Recently I came across an online comment that turned one leader’s failure into an indictment of churches and Christian leaders generally.
The scholars I read this week suggested that David feared something similar: unresolved wrongdoing could give foolish people reason to ridicule the faith he professed.
Suddenly I wasn’t thinking primarily about other leaders.
I was thinking about me.
What Can’t I See?
“Save me from all my wrongdoings.”
This can be a dangerous prayer. By definition, I cannot see my blind spots. If I could see them, they wouldn’t be blind spots. The hardest correction to receive may be the one that exposes something I sincerely could not see.
Sometimes God may answer this prayer through a spouse. A friend. A colleague. A child. Perhaps even someone we find irritating. Sometimes God’s mercy arrives as an awkward conversation.
That brought me back to my dream.
What bothered me most wasn’t what I saw through the hotel doorway.
It was my reluctance to say anything.
Of course, we can get this badly wrong. Not every concern is valid. Not every personal conviction is a biblical command. Christian maturity does not mean becoming spiritual police, patrolling everyone else’s boundaries.
But neither is love the same thing as niceness. Sometimes love says, I may be wrong, but something here concerns me.
An awkward conversation today may be far kinder than the public conversation years from now.
So perhaps the question I need to ask is:
Who has permission to tell me something I don’t want to hear?
Prayer time at a conference this spring. We need people who will pray with us—and help us see what we cannot see alone.
We are Not Home Yet
Then Psalm 39 ends with one of the strangest prayers in Scripture:
“Turn Your eyes away from me, that I may become cheerful again Before I depart and am no more.”
At first it almost sounds as though David wants God to leave him alone.
He doesn’t.
The language echoes Job. David has been experiencing God’s painful correction. He wants God to hear his cry and see his tears, but he also longs for the season of correction to end.
He has faced his frailty, his wrongdoing, his misplaced attachments, and the astonishing brevity of his life. Now David asks for enough relief to become cheerful again.
I find something deeply hopeful in that:
God’s correction is not the destination.
The goal is restored life with God—loving Him, loving our neighbours, doing useful work, enjoying the people around us, receiving ordinary gifts with gratitude, and holding what has been entrusted to us with open hands.
There is too much goodness in God’s world to spend the life that remains staring endlessly at ourselves.
Sometimes grace exposes us. And sometimes grace arrives through awkward conversations. And, when the hard work has done what it needed to do, grace reminds us:
It is time for another season. To love well. Enjoy what God has given you. There is still a whole garden to embrace—and still time to smile.
Correction and testing are not the destination. David asks for life and joy again—and the larger biblical story moves in that same direction.
Three Requests
1. Show me what I cannot see.
“Save me from all my wrongdoings” is a courageous prayer, and God takes it seriously.
2. Give a few trustworthy people permission to speak.
I need people who love me enough to risk awkward conversations—and enough humility to listen even when I think I’m right.
3. When correction has done its work, teach me to live freely again.
My days are brief. Help me hold what You have entrusted to me lightly, love people well, and receive Your good world with overflowing gratitude.
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A Prayer
Lord Jesus,
My days are brief. There are things in me I cannot see.
Save me from my wrongdoings. Show me where I am drifting toward an edge. Give me people who love me enough to tell me the truth.
Give me humility when You correct me, Courage when love requires an awkward conversation, And wisdom to hold what You have entrusted to me with open hands.
And when Your correction has done its good work, Help me to receive life again with gratitude, To love You and the people around me, To enjoy Your good world, To smile again.
Amen.
With gratitude,
Rick and Deanna
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Scripture quotations are from the NASB 2020 unless otherwise noted.
